The Only Consistent Thread of Trumpism
This administration
embodies a new type of conservatism centered on the impulse to destroy.
Apr 18, 2025
Nearly three months into the second Trump administration, a
few things have become clear.
For one thing, the president aims to push executive power
to its absolute limit, with Congress responding passively to the power-grabs
and the judiciary standing alone in attempting to prevent the thoroughgoing
breakdown of the separation of powers and its replacement by unitary,
dictatorial rule by Donald Trump.
For another, Trump himself has established an unprecedented
level of personal control over policy. Unlike most previous presidents, he
isn’t just setting broad goals (e.g. “make our trade policy more
protectionist”) and letting expert advisers figure out the details and present
him with several reasonable options from which to choose. Rather, Trump is
receiving advice and then making his own judgment calls, often opting for much
riskier courses of action and haphazard shifts of direction.
This is clearest when it comes to international
trade. Tariffs are
imposed, then suspended; tariff rates are set much higher than the
president’s staff advised, then dropped when bond-market gyrations provoke fear
of a Trump-branded financial crisis; then a long list of exceptions to the
tariffs is announced; and so forth. The result is a level of impulsiveness and
resulting uncertainty beyond anything previously considered normal.
We see something slightly less egregious, though perhaps
equally improvisational, when it comes to immigration policy, where Trump
appears to be listening to his most nativist advisers (above all, Stephen
Miller) in looking for ways to disregard laws and rules that stymie efforts to
deport undocumented immigrants at will and without due
process.
But stepping back a bit from the relentless and anarchic
daily news cycle to take in the whole of what’s transpired since January 20,
something else becomes apparent: The administration is governing in an
overwhelmingly negative way. The president and his team are
out to destroy, like demolition experts sent into a high-rise housing project
to level the buildings, leaving a vast vacant lot.
That’s not what one would expect from a conservative
administration. But it is exactly what one gets with a reactionary (or
counter-revolutionary) regime that thinks the order of the present has little
if anything worth conserving. That has long been what separates conservative
from reactionary impulses. The former seeks to slow down or even halt changes
out of love for an inheritance from the past and a fear of unintended
consequences that threaten to destroy fragile institutions and customs that
have been handed down to us. The latter, by contrast, looks around at the
present with disgust and seeks to reduce it to rubble in the hope that a
vaguely-discerned new beginning might emerge, mysteriously, from the wreckage.
The evidence is overwhelming that the second Trump
administration is governing like its leading figures are animated by precisely
such an appetite for destruction.
Shredding State Capacity
It began, strangely enough, with USAID. Of all the programs
run by the federal government, foreign aid seems like an odd choice to provoke
maximal wrath. But whatever Elon Musk’s ultimate motives, one of the
administration’s very first acts of destruction was the (largely successful)
act of firing almost
the entirety of its staff and dismantling the agency itself.
(The scraps left over were then folded into the State Department to be overseen
by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.)
Then DOGE swiftly fanned out across the executive branch,
seeking to fire provisional employees, shut down programs, and gut funding for,
well, pretty much anything it could think of. At no point did Musk’s small army
of disrupters appear to take into consideration what any of these myriad
departments and agencies do—or how sweeping, mindless cuts could undermine
American state capacity at home and around the world. The goal was apparently
to make cuts for their own sake, undertaken on the assumption that nothing the
fired employees might have done in their jobs could possibly have been
worthwhile.
This wholly destructive outlook looks likely to animate the
administration’s oversight of the executive branch on multiple fronts for the
remainder of its time in office. The impulse to destroy is going to be applied
to the regulatory state quite broadly, with the president and his team seeking
to enact an anarchist-libertarian wet dream that eliminates “rules
that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation, and more.”
·
October 18, 2024
This animus against regulations sits uncomfortably
alongside Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s concern with identifying environmental
sources of troubling medical trends and (presumably) writing regulations to
restrict the toxins. Yet that won’t fly with the anti-regulatory priorities of
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency. And Kennedy’s outlook is so
intertwined with conspiracism about vaccines and other forms of medical
treatment and research that under his leadership, the Department of Health and
Human Services is likely to focus on canceling research grants and spreading
unjustified claims about various kinds of medical interventions.
That puts Kennedy in harmony with the administration’s
coordinated assault on scientific and medical research more generally. Animated
by what The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer aptly describes as
the Trump team’s hostility toward the knowledge workers of the
professional-managerial class, the president appears to be indifferent to all
the positive externalities that have flowed from government support for
scientific and medical research since the end of World War II. The United
States has become the world leader in technological and medical innovation,
while our scientists have pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge in a
long list of fields. As a result, American universities have become magnets for
talent from around the globe. But the president appears not to care about any
of that. Universities also teach the humanities, and humanities departments
often skew leftward—and that’s enough to justify an agenda of destruction.
Sand in the Gears of the Economy
Trump has been a protectionist
for decades. He believes in protecting American industries (and
workers) from foreign competition. One way to achieve such goals is to enact
barriers to foreign trade in the form of tariffs on imports. Done carefully,
with patience, and when combined with a well-designed and thoughtfully
implemented industrial policy, this could potentially yield positive results.
That statement should make clear I’m not a doctrinaire free trader. The Biden
administration made moves in a more protectionist direction, and it was yielding
some positive results, with a modest resurgence in manufacturing over the past
few years.
But Trump has been doing nothing remotely like what Biden
attempted. His implementation of tariffs has been impulsive,
extreme, and inconsistent. The result has been the equivalent of
pouring sand in the gears of the American (and global) economy. Consumers will
be hurt by higher prices. Industries (including manufacturers) will be hurt by
increased costs for foreign-made parts and retaliatory restrictions on
American-made goods in foreign markets. Investors (wealthy individuals as well
as people saving for retirement) will be hurt by falling stock prices. And
workers will be hurt by layoffs that are likely to take place once all of the
above begins to dampen economic growth.
More fundamentally, Trump’s incoherence and incontinence
have taken a serious toll on perceptions of the United States and our currency.
The American dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since the end of
World War II in large part because investors and governments around the world
have considered our country the safest and most dynamic place in the world to
do business. But that has been changing, with investors selling shares of
American companies and U.S. Treasuries in response to the
president’s wildly erratic decisions.
Some defenders of
the Trump administration have tried to portray this as something intentional—a
deliberate attempt at “de-dollarization”
that will encourage global sales of suddenly cheaper American goods and
investment by foreign companies drawn to opportunities for profits made
possible by a weaker dollar. But how likely is such behavior? Since it assumes
the capital flight driving down the dollar will be accompanied or immediately
followed by new forms of economic engagement with and commitment to the United
States, I think it’s not especially likely at all.
To get a sense of what the future holds, consider
what’s happening to
tourism. Trump is convincing world travelers to avoid the United
States. They find its president morally loathsome, and his border
policies—which have led to well-publicized stories of visitors being detained,
harassed, and expelled upon arrival—a source of acute anxiety. So people are
choosing en masse to stay away. That points to a future in
which de-dollarization results in little economic benefit, while also
undercutting the purchasing power of American consumers, at least for products
manufactured abroad.
Then there are the potentially ruinous consequences for
public budgeting of surging U.S. Treasury yields. Trump can yell at the Fed
Chair all he wants, but if people around the world sell T-bills, interest rates
will continue to rise, markedly increasing our debt burden with every new
Treasury auction. That’s another thing toward which the administration appears
to be oblivious: the extent to which our standard of living and ability to run
budget deficits (that is, our freedom as a society to avoid raising revenue to
cover our expenses) has been facilitated by good will and admiration around the
world that Donald Trump is torching with every insulting and reckless statement
and decision.
Foreign Policy Folly
Nowhere is this clearer than in foreign policy, where the
administration is acting like its primary motive is to liberate itself from
obligations to everyone and anyone. Deep, long-lasting, and incredibly
beneficial institutional and interpersonal relationships built up over 80 years
are being treated by the president and his advisers like exploitative
constraints from which they are eager to break free.
That will almost certainly take the form of the United
States backing away from NATO—something telegraphed by the administration’s
vocal contempt for Ukraine, its dismissive and condescending attitudes toward
European leaders, and the president’s repeated threats to annex Greenland, a
territory of NATO-member Denmark.
It could also team up with Israel to bomb Iran—or not.
Or it could take the form of challenging China in East
Asia—though doing so will surely be more difficult now than it seemed to be
three months ago, before Trump slapped painful tariffs on many of the countries
we will need as allies in making moves to counter Beijing.
Or it could take the form of America primarily withdrawing
to our sides of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as Trump seeks to build a
foreign policy around a revived and
updated Monroe Doctrine that has us primarily meddling in the
affairs of countries in our hemisphere like Canada, Mexico, Panama, Greenland,
El Salvador, and Venezuela.
Those are a lot of mutually exclusive possibilities, and
the lack of any discernible grand strategy behind them points to just how
unsettled policymaking has become since Trump returned to the White House.
That’s how it is when an administration puts destruction at the center of its
worldview and has no positive vision beyond the president’s commitment to a
zero-sum view of the world. Insisting at all times that each nation’s gain must
entail another’s loss and that any effort to achieve mutually beneficial
outcomes amounts to an expression of muddle-headed sentimentality is bound to
have destabilizing consequences for world order.
As in so many other areas, the second Trump administration
appears to be placing absolute faith in the improvisational powers of the
president himself as he dances amidst the ruins he and his party have already
managed to make.
Damon Linker writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a
senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of
Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen
Center.
